Interpreting the English school: History,science and philosophy

Abstract

This article introduces the Special Issue on ‘Interpretivism and the English School of International Relations’. It distinguishes between what we term the interpretivist and structuralist wings of the school and argues that disagreement about its preferred approach to the study of international relations has generated confusion about what it stands for and weakened its capacity to respond to alternative approaches. It puts the case for a reconsideration of the underlying philosophical positions that the school wishes to affirm and suggests that a properly grounded interpretivism may serve it best. The final part of the article discusses the topics and arguments of the remaining pieces in the Special Issue.

Keywords

English school of international relations historicism international relations theory interpretivism structuralism

Since its revival in the late 1990s, the English school of international relations (IR) has emerged as a one of the most widely recognised approaches to the study of IR. During that time, its adherents have produced a series of important contributions to the field (including, inter alia, Bellamy, 2005; Buzan, 2004; Buzan and Little, 2000; Clark, 2005, 2007, 2011; Cochran, 2009; Dunne and Reus-Smit, 2017; Hall, 2006; Hurrell, 2007; Jackson, 2000; Keal, 2003; Keene, 2002; Linklater and Suganami, 2006; Ralph, 2007; Schouenborg, 2011; Stivachtis, 1998; Suzuki, 2009; Wheeler, 2000; Williams, 2015; Zhang, 1998), and acquired a dedicated section of the International Studies Association. Yet it continues to be dogged by criticisms that its underlying philosophical assumptions are confused, its notion of theory is problematic, its core concepts are imprecise or poorly formulated, its methods are unclear and its politics conservative or even reactionary. These criticisms were first levelled in the mid-1960s at its early adherents (see especially Kaplan, 1966) and have been since reiterated by various antagonists (see, for example, Adler, 2005; Callahan, 2004; Copeland, 2003; Finnemore, 2001; Hall, 2001; Jones, 1981; Murray, 2013).

Moreover, considerable disagreement remains within the contemporary English school about all these issues. Some would prefer to stick with what they take to be the early school’s commitments to historicism and hermeneutics, and to a focus on the thought and behaviour of practitioners – politicians, diplomats and what the early school called ‘statesmen’ – as well as on past international theories (see, for example, Bain, 2007a; Epp, 1998; Hall, 2015; Jackson, 2000; Wilson, 2012). They argue that this approach – which we characterise as ‘interpretivist’ – continues to offer powerful tools for comprehending past and present IR. Others have advocated developing the English school’s intellectual and normative agendas by embracing aspects of critical theory, post-structuralism or social constructivism (see Der Derian, 1994; Dunne, 1995; Linklater, 1990; Neumann, 2001; Reus-Smit, 2002). But arguably, the largest group in the last two decades has advocated that the school set aside some of its traditional commitments and make greater use of concepts, theories and approaches developed elsewhere in the field of IR, including constructivism, structural realism, regime theory and institutionalism, and in other social sciences, especially sociology. Led by Barry Buzan, this group has produced many of the most prominent and influential recent works associated with the school (see, for example, Brems Knudsen and Navari, 2018; Buzan, 2014, 2015; Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2009; Buzan and Little, 1996; Buzan and Schouenborg, 2018; Buzan and Zhang, 2014; Falkner and Buzan, 2019; Friedner Parrat, 2017; Little, 2007; Spandler, 2015). Eschewing both intellectual and diplomatic history on the one hand, and normative concerns on the other, they have advanced what might best be termed a structural account of international society that borrows heavily from what we term the ‘modernist’ social sciences.¹

For what does the English school stand?

These various internal debates and divergences often make the English school difficult for outsiders to characterise. Indeed, even insiders sometimes find it hard to describe, let alone to spell out its approach to the field. Generally speaking, however, we can say that the English school is considered either as a group that employs a particular style of research to investigate a variety of different topics, or as a group that explores a particular set of concepts and phenomena using a range of different approaches.

On the first understanding, the school is taken to represent a style of research that contrasts with the more modernist, formal and positivist approaches said to dominate American international relations (see, for example, Bull, 1966; Dunne, 1998; Epp, 1998; James, 1982). The school is seen as exhibiting commitments to history, agency and contingency in ways that many (but not all) think make its work readily combinable with normative theories and practices that aim to improve – or at least best manage – international society.² These commitments are seen as distinct from those of American modernist approaches that aim at grand theories or formal models and often ignore history and agency, as well as promoting a supposedly neutral and scientific approach to policy making. On this understanding, what makes the English school distinctive and valuable are its implicit anti-naturalism and historicism, and its explicit preferences for hermeneutics as a means of gathering data and for normative theory. In other words, the school is seen as interpretivist in orientation, focusing on the meanings that actions have for the human actors that perform them and the value of those actions.

On the second understanding, which aligns more with the structuralists – and which is not shared by all adherents (for contrary arguments, see Dunne, 2005; Hall, 2001; Jackson, 2000, 2009) – the school is defined not by its assumptions or approach, nor by a commitment to interpretivism. Instead, the English school is simply characterised by its focus on the notion of ‘international society’ and its associated ‘institutions’. On this understanding, what the school does is explain important aspects of IR by exploring the relationships between international systems, international societies and varieties of ‘world society’, with a particular interest in the structures of their social institutions (Buzan, 2001, 2004; Little, 2000). For proponents of this view, the English school can and should embrace ‘methodological pluralism’ in its investigations of the structures of international society and draw upon the full range of both interpretivist and modernist approaches, including formal theory or institutionalism (see, for example, Buzan, 1993; Navari, 2009; Wilson, 2012).

This Special Issue does not settle this disagreement about what the English school stands for, or what it ought to stand for. Both the guest editors and the contributors recognise that there are different views about how international society should be approached within and outside the school. But we also agree that discussing these issues is important, and that the school has not yet done enough to explicate what the school stands for nor lay out its underlying assumptions – especially on the interpretivist side, which has arguably struggled to keep up with the output of the structuralists. As a consequence, we suggest, the school has struggled to broaden its appeal, and has become focussed on topics and approaches that make it hard to distinguish from other schools. At the same time, it is has failed fully to exploit connections with other fields and other schools that might open up new avenues of research.

Does the English school need philosophy?

As guest editors, we invited the contributors to this Special Issue to reflect on whether the English school should commit itself more clearly and wholeheartedly to interpretivism. To open the discussion, this introduction provides some philosophical and theoretical grounds for affirming an interpretivist orientation and for asserting the importance of history, agency and contingency against modernism and its associated methods. In so doing, we recognise that there are roles for things such as formal models and statistical analysis in the study of IR, but argue that we should not fetishise these methods to the point where we lose sight of what we might call the historicity of human life and the capacity of people to make their world. We affirm the notion that scholars of IR can and should make use of diverse methodological techniques to study the social world, but ultimately their methods and their explanations of social action should respect both human agency and historical contingency.

Some readers may not think they need these kinds of philosophical arguments at all. We suggest that is naïve. We recognise too there is a case for characterising the English school in a way that does not tie it to a particular philosophical position. Its adherents have rarely been explicit about their philosophy, some have not given a great deal of thought to the relevant philosophical issues, and some who have considered about the issues have perhaps reached different conclusions. Many members of the early English school – notably Herbert Butterfield – were historians sceptical of philosophy as a field and a practice (see especially Bentley, 2011). And we recognise both that it would be unfair retrospectively to impose a uniform philosophy on the school and that there are good pragmatic reasons to characterise it in ways that do not tie it to any one set of philosophical ideas. Keeping the English school as a ‘Broad Church’, open to a range of scholars, is an advantage in the academic marketplace, as others have argued (see, for example, Buzan, 2005). Given that the study of IR is presently dominated by modernism, there is a virtue in trying to keep as many as possible of those critical of these approaches within the camp.

Nonetheless, we argue that for several reasons, its individual exponents need to have clear philosophical positions. For a start, if they fudge philosophical issues, their own individual research will lack sharpness and clarity. If they do not know whether they think states are natural entities or social concepts, then their own explanations of what they do will lack conviction. They will be unable to be clear whether they are explaining foreign policy by reference to some key fact about a state or whether they are treating it as the product of a struggle over policy by different social actors within certain borders. Again, if they do not know whether the international system is an open-ended space in which different orders are negotiated by agents, or something that has a structural logic that imposes limits to what states might do, then their explanations will necessarily be unacceptably vague. They will be unable to be clear whether they are explaining an aspect of the international system by reference to contingent historical processes or some kind of systemic logic.

A lack of philosophical clarity also undermines the standing of the English school as a whole. It is one thing to promote the English school as a Broad Church that accommodates several philosophical positions that are clearly defended and in robust dialogue with one another. It is quite another to promote it as an approach that has no interest in addressing or debating philosophical questions. If the advocates of the English School are effectively to oppose modernist and positivist approaches, they need to be able to point to flaws in these approaches, as Hedley Bull, in particular, did during the so-called ‘Second Great Debate’ in the mid- to late-1960s (see Bull, 1966, 1968, 1972 cf. Epp, 1998; Jackson, 2000, 2009; James, 1982). They need to be able to explain why more formal modes of explanation – models and correlations that bestride time and place – are of limited value within the social sciences. If the English school places methods at the centre of their debate with modernism, they will lose that debate, since more data, more rigorously treated is obviously better, when appropriate. Therefore, if the English school wants to push back against modernism, it needs to be clear that its argument is a philosophical one that relates to the appropriateness of certain methods and especially certain modes of explanation.

The English School as a whole might fruitfully remain a Broad Church, but we argue that its adherents need to grapple more closely with key philosophical issues. As a start, we have suggested that there are two main philosophical strands within the English School – a more structuralist one, grounded in modernism, and a more interpretivist one.³ The structuralist strand within the English School stresses the inevitability or unavoidability of certain systemic logics, or, at the very least, stresses their power over states and individuals. On this view, both the structure of international society and the structure of its component institutions drive states and individuals to behave in certain ways. This contention is clearest in Barry Buzan’s multiple recent works (especially Buzan, 1993, 2004, 2014) and studies taking their cue from his ideas (see, for example, Brems Knudsen and Navari, 2018; Friedner Parrat, 2017; Spandler, 2015), but was prefigured in a number of studies published by scholars associated with the school from the 1970s onwards, as well as wider developments in international theory since the 1950s. It builds on earlier work that Hidemi Suganami characterised as ‘British institutionalism’, which he thought had become the ‘mainstream’ approach to IR in that country in the 1970s and early 1980s (Suganami, 1983). Structuralism found partial expression in Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society (1977), as Cornelia Navari (2020) observes, and also in Robert Purnell’s The Society of States (1973), F. S. Northedge’s The International Political System (1976), or Geoffrey Stern’s The Structure of International Society (1995), all products of the London School of Economics, and all influenced in one way or another by C.A.W. Manning’s idiosyncratic thought about international society and by institutionalist theories (see Jackson, 2020; Long, 2005; Suganami, 2001).

By contrast, the interpretivist strand holds that humans act in accord with reasons that are rooted in what we might call traditions, loosely understood as sets of beliefs, concepts and theories about how the world works and what they ought to do to achieve their ends.⁴ It is nominalist – treating entities like the ‘state’ as abstract social concepts arising from the beliefs of individual agents engaged in IR. And it holds that any apparent systemic logic within IR operates only because specific individuals happen contingently to hold beliefs that inspire them to act in the way that such a logic would suggest. This view finds its clearest expression in the works of Herbert Butterfield, who published a number of studies on past and contemporary beliefs and their relationship to practice (see, for example, Butterfield, 1953, 1960, 1975), C.A.W. Manning (1962), and Martin Wight, who laid out his understanding of the predominant traditions of thinking about IR and provided accounts of how he believed they shaped the behaviour of practitioners in his essays in Diplomatic Investigations (Butterfield and Wight, 1966), as well as in those collected into Systems of States (Wight, 1977) and the revised edition of Power Politics (Wight, 1978). It is manifest too in R.J. Vincent’s (1974) books on non-intervention and human rights (1986), James Mayall’s (1990) work on nationalism, as well as edited collections like his Community of States (1982), David Armstrong’s (1993) assessment of revolutionary states, Nicholas Wheeler’s (2000) study of humanitarian intervention, Robert Jackson’s (2000) explorations of human conduct, Paul Keal’s study of indigenous peoples and international society (Keal, 2003), Andrew Hurrell’s analysis of international order (Hurrell, 2007) and Ian Clark’s books (among them Clark, 1989, 2005, 2007, 2011). All of these works focus, to one extent or another, on the beliefs of actors engaged in IR and the practices that arise from inter-subjective agreement and contestation between them.⁵

Questions in search of answers

The two strands present in the English school – the structuralist and interpretivist – have different philosophical underpinnings.⁶ All adherents to the school are familiar with concepts such as ‘society’, ‘anarchy’ and ‘system’, and most deploy them in their work, but they seem to disagree about how to analyse these concepts or they use them without providing a clear analysis of the objects to which they refer. We suggest that all these terms can be disaggregated. They can be unpacked into different types of object – and should be, in order that the school can be clearer about its assumptions.

Interpretivists ascribe existence to human beings, beliefs and actions (Bevir and Blakely, 2019). And they see ‘society’, ‘anarchy’ or ‘system’ and the like as abstract terms referring to contingent clusters of human beings, beliefs and actions. Interpretivists think of ‘society’ as a kind of tradition into which individuals are initiated, not as some kind of structure in which they are held. It can be conceived as an ideational background against which individuals come to adopt an initial web of beliefs about how to conduct IR. It influences (without determining or – in a strict philosophical sense – limiting) the beliefs they later go on to adopt and the actions they perform. But there is no inevitability about people coming to think of ‘society’ as they do. Nor would it be given that people will continue to think of it in the way that they initially do. Interpretivists recognise that as a contingent historical fact, people come to think about international affairs, norms, and laws in particular ways, and hold that those ways become a kind of tradition that practitioners, scholars and laypeople inherit as they too come to think about IR. Researching international society would thus involve explaining why people hold the beliefs they do. And because beliefs are constitutive of actions, it would help to explain actions. It would not, of course, fully explain their actions partly because people act on desires as well as beliefs, and partly because, as interpretivists acknowledge, people are agents capable of innovating against the background of a tradition.

For three reasons, structuralists might object to thinking about international society as a tradition, with all of the historicity and contingency that implies. First, they often conceive the ideational and material as contrasting facets of international affairs. Interpretivists, however, are sceptical about whether this distinction can be made in the social world. They argue that we only come to understand that world by initiation into traditions of thought about what beliefs, actions, practices and institutions mean for those involved with them. They hold that all experiences are mediated by theory, in other words – by prior knowledge and understandings about how the social world ‘works’. For interpretivists, the social world is suffused with meaning, and no meaningful distinction between the ideational and material can be drawn.

Second, structuralists sometimes treat social concepts as if they captured fixed kinds. They argue that social concepts are analogous to water in having an essence (H₂O), which is common to all cases of the things to which the concept refers, and which also explains other features and properties of these things. Structuralists might treat social concepts as natural kinds precisely because they think of them as referring to a material part of the social world that is not constructed in part by ideas or theories. In contrast, interpretivists hold that social concepts are pragmatic constructs. Appeals to essences are incompatible with the contingency implied by recognition of the constructed nature of the social world. So, interpretivists suggest that social concepts, including structures, are characterised by fuzzy boundaries, not essences. They suggest that we can justify drawing the fuzzy boundaries only (if at all) by reference to our purposes, not a fixed or natural order.

Third, structuralists sometimes equate social explanation with the more general explanations of natural science. They suggest that we can explain social phenomena by reference to the causal properties of structures or other such social facts. This naturalism relies, of course, on the idea that structures have essences that explain other aspects of the social world. In contrast, interpretivists decentre structures precisely because they do not ascribe essences to them; they regard traditions, practices and the like as products of contingent beliefs and actions. Hence, they look to alternative forms of explanation appropriate to the pragmatically constructed concepts that allow for the meaningful and contingent nature of the social world.

Finally, we should note that these philosophical commitments shape the methods interpretivists choose to conduct their research, as well as their attitudes to certain methods that arise from or affirm different philosophical commitments. It makes them wary of methods associated with naturalism, in particular – with the view that we should investigate the social world in the same way as the natural world. Since the 17th-century scientific revolution, naturalism has given rise to successive waves of influential approaches and methods to studying both the social and natural worlds. Over the past century, these have included a major push for a unified theory of social behaviour (‘behaviouralism’) and the development of a series of new ways to gather data and establish patterns that might allow ‘laws’ to be determined, as well as new heuristic tools, like formal modelling or rational choice (Bevir and Blakely, 2019: 88–114).

In our view, interpretivists should not dismiss the methods of data collection or analysis out of hand – many are, after all, sophisticated and powerful. But because they do not hold that the social world is akin to the natural world, they are historicists, they hold a strong view of human agency, and they argue that explaining social action involves discussion of the meaning of that action for agents, they gravitate to other methods. These might include ethnography or textual hermeneutics, but whatever the method used, the focus will be on determining the meanings of actions for agents, not the outward characteristics of individuals or institutions. For interpretivists, then, the philosophical commitments drive the selection of methods.

Interpreting the English school

A key purpose of this Special Issue is to promote clearer thinking about the issues that divide the interpretivist and structuralist strands within the English school. Clearly, our own sympathies lie more with the interpretivist strand. But we do not want dogmatically to insist that the adherents of the English school must follow us. We seek rather to uphold the kind of ‘Broad Church’ we evoked earlier – a Broad Church in which scholars pursue interpretive studies of IR while debating the rival merits and indeed the compatibility of the philosophies, methodologies and other topics that they favour, alongside the structuralist work pursued by other adherents to the school. As a result, the essays that follow take a range of different positions and use different approaches. In at least two cases, they also interrogate the usefulness of interpretivism, and find it wanting. They all explore the role of interpretivism within the English school, or the role that interpretive approaches might play in better explaining certain issues, but they do not all agree on any particular position – either in interpreting previous work done by the school or in outlining future agendas for the school.

The first three contributions that follow explore the intellectual history of the English school to tease out its interpretivist and structuralist legacies and assess their respective values. In the first, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson returns to the work of C.A.W. Manning, an influential figure in the early history of the school, to examine his quasi-Wittgensteinian approach to IR and the virtues of ‘interpretive explanation’ more broadly in the analysis of IR. Jackson finds fault both with Manning’s approach and with its application, which he thinks left him without the necessary instruments to critique the world around him, as well as describe its rules and practices. In their article, Mark Bevir and Ian Hall also look back at the early school, at the thought of Butterfield, Wight and Bull, in particular, and the differences between the historicism of Butterfield and Wight and the ‘reluctant modernism’ that emerges with and after Bull. They argue their ‘classical approach’ took the forms that it did, opening the way for both the interpretivist and structuralist strands to develop, because they were responses to the threats to discipline of history caused by the collapse of what they call ‘developmental historicism’ and the rise of the ‘modernist’ social sciences. They also argue that the rediscovery of the early school’s interpretivism could open new avenues for research for contemporary adherents, as well as clarifying the school’s core commitments.

In the second half of the Special Issue, the contributors turn to how interpretivist approaches might profitably be used in IR to analyse key topics. Daniel Green returns to one of the most important arguments made by the school – its narrative of the ‘expansion’ of international society, found in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson’s edited collection and other major works (see Bull and Watson, 1984; Buzan and Little, 2013; Dunne and Reus-Smit, 2017; Watson, 1993). He argues, in particular, that the nature of the expansion in the 19th century, driven by European imperialism, was a function of the triumph of one liberal ideology over another, opening the way to a different conception of international society.

In her piece, Jacinta O’Hagan looks at another long-standing theme of the English school’s work: inter-civilisational contact and interaction. She argues that the school needs to reconsider its internal ‘discourses of civilisation’, as well as those that have arisen elsewhere, to understand their role in constructing different understandings of international society.

The next two articles apply interpretivist approaches and English school concepts to contemporary challenges posed by the re-emergence of China as a major global power. Benjamin Zala’s article builds on recent English school work on the so-called ‘special responsibilities’ of great powers and argues that we need also to think about the parallel concept of ‘special rights’, especially the claim to ‘spheres of influence’. The following article, by Liselotte Odgaard, uses an interpretivist approach to explain the evolution of the People’s Republic of China’s approach to the principle of Responsibility to Protect, arguing that it is a function of its wider conception of international order and the role that it might play as provider of an alternative understanding of that principle.

In closing piece, Cornelia Navari pushes back against an interpretive turn in the contemporary school and offers a qualified defence of a more structuralist approach. She argues that ‘new institutionalism’ and ‘structuration’ theory, in particular, point to a better way forward, allowing the school to retain the insight that anarchy does indeed cause certain actions, while recognising, at the same time, that human beings have some capacity to change the institutions in which they find themselves.

As a whole, the Special Issue does not settle the issue of whether or not the English school should embrace an ‘interpretive turn’, nor does it aim to do so. What it seeks to do instead is reopen a conversation about commitments often unspoken or half-hidden within its intellectual history, and whether they suggest new directions for its work.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Ian Hall

Notes

Author biographies

Mark Bevir is a Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. He is also a professor in the Graduate School, United Nations University (MERIT), and a Distinguished Research Professor at Swansea University. His most recent book is Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-authored with Jason Blakely.

Ian Hall is a Professor of International Relations at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He is the Deputy Director (Research) of the Griffith Asia Institute, an Academic Fellow of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne, and the co-editor (with Sara E. Davies) of the Australian Journal of International Affairs. His most recent book is Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy (Bristol University Press, 2019).

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